The linguistic thought of Ernest Gellner

Theoretical questions concerning language and communication figure prominently throughout the work of the Czech-British social philosopher and anthropologist Ernest Gellner (1925-1995). The article traces the development of Gellner's linguistic thought from his early, controversial engagements with Ordinary Language Philosophy to his responses to Chomsky's work in linguistics and his late-career (re)assessments of Wittgenstein and particularly Malinowski whose - subsequently repudiated - view of the fundamental difference between the alleged "primitive" and "scientific" functions of language turns out to play a central explanatory role in Gellner's renowned theory of nationalism. The key to understanding Gellner's thinking on language is to grasp both his adherence to a "telementational" model of communication and his scientism. This leads him to embrace the view that modern national cultures are predicated upon an industrial-scientific mode of cognition which both requires and entails a radically distinctive metaphysics of communication, namely one which allows for the conveyance of culture-transcending, "context-free" conceptual content. This, I claim, is a serious error which stems in large part from a misdiagnosis of the cognitive and communicative consequences of literacy and in particular a failure to correctly apprehend what linguist Roy Harris has termed the autoglottic space engendered by the availability of writing.